A conversation between Lex Berman and John McVey.Recorded in Cambridge, MA on 12th April, 2019.

In this podcast, John McVey explains the historical technology and language of telegraphic codes.

These historical code books were printed by various companies, sometimes for internal use to expedite their global businesses in the late 19th Century. This was back at the beginning of electronic signal processing. Just as the world was being spanned by communication systems, the signal codes of the day (such as Morse code) and the keystroke-saving codebooks were developed. John explains their origins, the typesetting, design, and above all the content of the telegraphic code books, which resonate with their own unintential poetic sensabilities.

Although the original publication date of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is listed as 1886, apparently it was actually published in an edition of 3000 copies in December of 1885. The booksellers, it seems, would not take a chance on that title until after the Christmas rush had died down and after it had been reviewed by the Times. Subsequently, the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde went on sale in January of 1886. The first edition had the unusual feature of a publication date on the title page that was corrected by hand with pen and ink. (1)

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his classic tale of a split personality at Bourenmouth, in his usual state of high strung nervousness. It is said that the story originated in a dream – a nightmare – and was improved based on suggestions from Stevenson’s wife, Fanny Osbourne.

While in Bournemouth, the Stevensons were visited by the young painter, John Singer Sargent, who captured them in a famous portrait. In that painting, Stevenson is pacing madly around – his habit while writing or thinking – and Fannie sits casually on a couch, wearing an Indian sari. (2)

The book became a sensation in London, and its popularity attracted impresarios to take on the dual role of the scientist and his bestial alter ego. Interestingly, the world premiere of the first Jekyll and Hyde adaption for the stage was held in Boston, in 1887, with a book written Thomas Russell Sullivan. One thing about that Sullivan fellow: well, far out ‘stache, brother!

Only three days after the show opened at London’s Lyceum Theatre, (in those days managed by none other than Bram Stoker), Martha Tabram was found murdered in Whitechapel of London’s East End. This was the first of a series of murders that later became associated with Jack the Ripper.

So convincing was the performance of Richard Mansfield, as he transformed from the earnest physician, Dr. Jekyll, into the madman, Mr. Hyde, that people suspected him of being the real murderer. (4) He went on to reprise the role many times over the next twenty years.

As if Jekyll and Hyde’s Self–Other internal conflict and its overtones of split personality was not enough fodder for the big screen, other film adaptions were later spawned from the storyline. For example, the weird classic The Son of Dr. Jekyll (1951), with Louis Hayward.

In this version, the intrepid son must pick up where his father left off, after having been tossed out the academy for his occult practices. Amidst plenty of unconvincing tinkering around with flasks of smoking and bubbling beverages, there are some more realistic images of the Doctor’s nervous fingers tapping out measures of white powder on little squares of paper, followed by sudden bursts of anger and agression, like swatting a whole rack of glass vials off his workbench.

And let us not forget the crazy Hammer Films mash-up from 1971, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, where the the story gets mixed together with the Ripper murders, along with another historical case of grave-robberies that occurred more than half a century earlier.

In Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, the Doctor procures fresh cadavers, (supplied by the time-out-of-joint murderers Burke and Hare). Jekyll extracts hormones from the corpses and mixes them into his fearsome potion, which then has a double effect: turning him into a wild beast, and changing his gender to female. Martine Beswick starred as Sister Hyde, in what can only be considered as the moment when cinema progressed from transvestite to trans-gender roles.

“Jekyll and Hyde was inspired initially by a nightmare. Stevenson had writtern a straightforward horror story, but his wife suggested more could be done with it – for example the allegorical undertones and ideas of duality found in the published version. Stevenson burnt his original manuscript and began again, re-writing the entire novel in three days.” justcollecting

Shortly before his death Stevenson wrote, “I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim obliterated polite face of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic—or maenadic—foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me.”Jekyll and Hyde. “The Double Life of Robert Louis Stevenson” by Marogt Livesey, in The Atlantic (Nov 1994)

“It hurts to watch this. The cathedral is the symbol, the heart of Paris,” said Pierre-Eric Trimovillas, 32.”

To see Notre Dame bursting up bright into flames makes the heart leap with emotion: shock, anger, loss. The symbol of France! A place where the most profound classics can stroll in harmony with the most trivial amusements, how can it be?

One is aghast. How can it be!

An era has come to a sudden blazing conclusion. On the same day that the Titanic sank! What a strange coincidence… The spiritual age that built the cathedral has reached the end of it’s days, like a mightly tree that we thought could never fall. Now those mighty oak beams - la forêt - are a ruin of ash.

We all sense that a new age is dawning. We can all feel it. But none of us knows what happens next.

A conversation between Lex Berman and Derek Murphy.Recorded in Cambridge, MA on 28th March, 2019.

In this podcast, Lex and Derek talk about how they found out about Situationism and what it means… or at least what they think it means.

The discussants touch upon various books, such as Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus, The Dream Years by Lisa Goldstein, as well as topics from Antonin Artaud, Karl Marx, and punk rock zine culture. The question is: how can the Situationist analysis of the Spectacle help _us_ to transform public space into autonomous zones with personal meaning and psychogeographical depth.

Regards to everyone on this Super Worm Moon, the Spring Equinox of 2019!

The Farmer’s Almanac tells us that the “worm moon” has something to do with nightcrawlers wriggling out of the softening soil. But if you ask me, this Super Worm Moon has other implications for our current state of affairs on planet Earth.

Climate change is descending fast, with entire cities being engulfed in flames or flattened by cyclones. None of it seems to matter, as our entrenched self-appointed elites disregard science, the rule of law, or even reality, as they continue raking their bloody claws through any resources they can exploit. Truly, we do not seem to be dealing with innocent earthworms, those little workers who replenish the soil. We are dealing with the Worm, the evil one that is writhing in our soul, devouring us as it devours itself.

What to do?

Well, when the going gets this weird, you might as well focus on what is meaningful and amusing to yourself… you are not going to get a break from the flailing, nose-diving mainstream media, that’s for sure.

With this in mind, I am happy to offer the first issue of Diamond Bay’s own zine, free for the taking and the thinking.

A little bit about the name of the zine is in order.Zapf.punkt is a mashup of Zap! (as in Zap Comix) and the brilliant font designer, Herman Zapf; while punkt means “point” or “dot.” In fact, this punkt refers to the bindi chakra, the third eye.

As for the sub-title, ein Schlag ins Gesicht des Weltraums, that translates as “a slap in the face of outer space!” Which is a basic objective of the nascent Diamond Bay Press. If any of this makes sense to you, please join the party.

Jules Verne is too well known, so that if you allow me to praise him it won’t be breaking news. Picturesque Algeria does not need to teach his readers that the sun is shining, that it’s hot during the month of August, (especially around Laghouat) (1), and that M. de Gavardie is slightly crazy. (2)

We cannot, however, let the great scientific popularizer pass by without giving him a tip of a hat, a stroke of a pencil, and a scratch of the pen. What we write has already been repeated a hundred times, and we are inevitably reduced to banalities. That’s what is boring about famous people; they were so often acclaimed by their contemporaries, that nothing is left to tell.

On leaving Algeria, Jules Verne may not have heard anything new here, but it can be certain, that he will carry new sympathies that will arise due to his good nature, his benevolence, and the well-rounded nature of his interests.

We knew he was a writer of intelligence and talent, and we found that he is also a man with a good heart. May the memory that he carries away from us be as affectionate as the one he leaves in the colony!

A few days ago, his yacht was anchored at Bône (3) to take on provisions, and the inhabitants forced him to disembark and gave him a drink of punch. In this country, he can say, when we take on coal, we are obliged to also take some punch.

“Souk at the Place Lambert, Bône, Algeria “ the present-day Annaba. src

The romantic researcher, may not have noticed all the phenomena that his travels in Algeria afforded him.

Let me tell him one.

In Oran, around the tables on which was served the punch of hospitality, we could see side by side and fraternally united, the members of the Judiciary standing or sitting alongside the journalists. So it was, to the accompaniment of the flute of Orpheus, that the tigers and the gazelles lived in peace.

Definitely the aura of genius, like music, softens the animal spirits, even those of the most carnivorous.

Le Citoyen BÊZY.

from an article at “CDHA (CENTRE DE DOCUMENTATION HISTORIQUE SUR L’ALGÉRIE)” . src

Notes:

Laghouat is a town some 400km south of Tunis, in the desert.

Henri-Edmond-Pierre Dufaur de Gavardie, the Senator for Landes in the National Assembly, was caricatured in 1882 by Alphonse Hector Colomb (pseudonym B. Moloch), gesticulating wildly at the podium, kicking his water glass through the air, and with his head completely upside-down on his shoulders.

Jules Verne sailed on his yacht, San Michel III, around the Mediterranean Sea in 1884. The city on the Northeast coast of Algeria, Bône, is today’s Annaba. This is the historic town of Hippo Regius, where Saint Augustine died (430 CE) during a seige mounted by the Vandals.

There are plenty of rumors about Hawaii, about rum-operations in the Caribbean, and a hidden fortress on the Moon.

Believe any or all of them, if you want.

The fact is, that no 150-kilogram monsters are welcome on this ship, unless I wrestle them on board myself. It’s a new paradigm in this time-scape.

While the yellow sun is painting the stark tree branches in New England, setting under frozen skies, we’re down here in flip-flops. The red bougainvillea blossoms are wrapping the dry adobe walls. The geckos are lurking like blue bats on the ceiling, chirping occasionally and turning their eyeballs on little stalks.

You can hear the ristras of red chili drying on the string that is nailed to the front door. Only now and then, does the wind rustle up from the canyon along the mesa. Then you’d swear a coyote was calling from a far way off. But what coyote? If there is one, she’s sleeping in the late afternoon sun, on the other side of this yucca plant.

Currently, my stomach is a little off… I think it was the biscochito milkshake from Blake’s. That is when you know that it really is better to stick with a vegan diet. You don’t have these off-kilter experiences with non-GMO milkfat, for one thing.

If you eat like this, you can avoid the murky hangover that processed foods give you. You can avoid the negative fallout of those who would keep you down, and completely escape the Curse of Lono.

When the thunderclouds come banging on your windows, and flip the coconut-fiber filters off the swamp cooler on the roof, you won’t need to grab the Samoan warclub and do battle with any strange gods. It’ll be just another day on the ranch. The jeweled lizards will get tired and disappear back into their trenches. The travelers will check in to the motor lodge. The tentacles of the octupus car wash will curl up and go to sleep.

You can step off the deck of the Humdinger and brew a cuppa pu-erh tea, from an old dried brick of tuo-cha some scholar left on the kitchen counter. (I wish she’d taken her donkey with her, too, for pity’s sake! At least the beatnik who left a few boxes of junk on the porch had the good sense to spice it up with underground comix…)

But let’s not quibble, a good evening cuppa, in the twilight of this planet Earth, is a kindness.

Faced with the task of actually running a home office, I realized that I had to get a printer.

Not having purchased one in the last 15 years, I rather forgot the ritual of trying to understand the diagrams about setting the device up, like pulling the toner tray out.

Just for the heck of it, I documented the process with some snapshots. Who knows, maybe there is some wayward soul out there, who just happens to be setting up their HL-Laserjet 2320D and now you have a photo guide!

The first thing you do is pop open the top half of the front side, which is where the whole toner tray is mounted.

Fold the paper flap that has convenient icon-sized instructions on it off the top of the machine and out of the way of the toner tray. Then grasp the green toner tray handle and slide it outwards from the printer. A few clicks are normal.

Pull the toner tray completely out of the printer and put it aside.

Once the toner tray is out, remove the entire orange plastic clip, and find the new toner package.

Cut open the toner package (near the indentation on the edge) and tear off the top.

Once the toner is out of the package, slide the orange cap on the side of the toner roller off.

Once you have the fresh toner roller exposed, you want to mount it directly into the toner tray that you hade removed earlier.

The roller on the toner cartridge will press against the roller in the toner tray. It should slide in and click into place.

Once the toner is completely inserted and locked into the position inside the toner tray, the toner tray can be loaded back into the printer body.

The toner tray should click back into place. Don’t force it to fit, just wiggle it and it should align properly then engage properly inside the printer.

Snap the front cover back into place.

Below the front cover, is the paper tray. Gently pull on the slot at the bottom of the tray until it pops open.

Load some paper into the tray. Then slide the paper tray back into the printer until it snaps shut.

Now ready to POWER ON! At this point, I plugged a USB cable into the printer and a Macbook Air laptop. (Note: there was no cable in the box, but I have plenty in my cables bin.)

Then, with the proper driver installed on Mac OS X 10.13, the LibreOffice Writer document was able to locate the new printer by default, and a perfect document was printed on the first click!

Later, I found that I sent a document to print, but had neglected to boot the printer up. When I powered up the Brother and connected the USB, the document had been spooled somewhere, and it printed by itself!

All in all, the new printer experience went much better than expected. (And yes, I deliberately wanted the cable connection model, not the wireless model.

And now I’m convinced that was the right way to go.

I named my printer after the cat in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. As Behomoth said: “I shall be a silent hallucination.”

Happy printing.

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<p><img src="http://www.yunchtime.net/misc/brother_2320D_1.jpg" alt=""></p>
<p>Faced with the task of actually running a home office, I real
Solstice is the shortest dayhttp://www.yunchtime.net/IDEAS/Solstice-the-shortest-day/2018-12-21T05:00:00.000Z2019-02-10T00:03:27.239Z

Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of year. It was a rainy day, with temperatures as high as 60 degrees Fahrenheit here in New England.

Global warming, being the long term rise of temperatures, is happening simultaneously with anthropogenic climate change (as any idiot knows), and today we surely felt it!

On the one hand, you have to appreciate how really strange it is for the shortest day of the year to feel just like early summer. On the other hand, with various obstacles, problems, and worries piled up to the skies, you have to wonder how so much trouble can pack itself into such a short period of time!

Not that there is any point in trying to keep up with the daily cycle of madness, but now even Mad Dog Mattis has resigned and stormed out of the White House in disgust. The irony is compounded by the fact that he was largely responding to Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. Military out of Syria.

Can you believe it?

Here I am, having protested so many of the U.S. military adventures – built on lies and dirty geopolitical deals with drug lords and tyrants, as most of them are – thinking that it has to be good thing to get us the hell out of Syria and Afghanistan. But at the same time, Trump seems to have taken the decision while on the phone with Erdogan: agreeing with Erdogan’s demand to get our troops out of there. In other words, I actually agreed with Trump’s decision, but not the reason why he made it. Similarly, I can’t stand Mattis or any of his professional instrumentalist types, who are basically the architects of the U.S. hegemonic empire. And yet, I sort of feel sympathy for him, because he is forced to watch as a reckless lunatic throws U.S. foreign policy into a spiral of total chaos.

And speaking of Foreign Policy, that miserable rag of geopolitical balderdash posing as a journal, they recently published a piece on why China’s Social Credit Score Isn’t Real. This sort of rubbish is what we expect of Doublespeak. So there you have it! We are truly in a post-truth world. It no longer matters if you just say the sky is red and the sea is yellow. Nothing makes sense, and nobody has any handle on reality at this point.

Which you’d think is a sort of perilous state to be in, and yet…

This is the thunder within the earth, as the I-Ching phrases it, or Alban Arthan for the druids. The time of little sun, of energy drawn down to the roots and hibernating among the rocks and stones. But it is the moment when the rebirth happens, when the tide turns, and new sparks are struck!

The way out is the way forward is the stillness and the unknowing. When things get this weird, the weird turn pro. Keep the faith! Light the signal fires! Sing the ever-changing anthem of being alive in the midst of chaos. Same as it ever was.

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<p><img src="http://www.yunchtime.net/misc/milkyway.jpg" alt=""></p>
<p>Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of year. It was a ra
Alan Moore on being an artisthttp://www.yunchtime.net/ARTS/Alan-Moore-on-being-an-artist/2018-11-25T05:00:00.000Z2018-11-25T22:12:01.837Z

My actual condition was that I was in a bleak, no-hope situation, and I decided that I would rather make the attempt at realizing myself as some sort of creative individual.I wanted to do something creative with my life.I would rather make the attempt and fail… than not make the attempt.

I found myself, (when I was ostensibly trying to start a career), working on a ridiculously epic script, that I was going to write and draw myself…

And after about three months, I’d got one page penciled and inked, another page penciled and half inked, and another page that was just a few scribbles. And I thought: why am I doing this to myself?

And I suddenly realized: oh you’re doing this, because you know that you’re never going to finish it.

Because if you were working upon a product you that could actually realize and finish, then that would mean having to send it off to somebody, and that would mean them judging it.

And they might say that: “No I’m sorry, this is rubbish, you’re wasting your time. All of your dreams of one day being a writer or an artist… no … you were deluded!”

And then you wouldn’t even have that dream anymore, would you?

And I thought, yeah, that’s what you’re doing. and that is completely stupid because

you’re denying yourself any kind of creative fulfilment because youre frightened of rejection

when any spotty 14 year-old poet – who’s got to stand up and read his work in public for the first time – can overcome that!

when any karaoke drunk can overcome that fear!

that is cowardly!

So I thought, yeah, work upon something that is realizable and sensible.

Send it in,have it rejected,learn from that experience,do something else,send it in again…

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<p><img src="http://www.yunchtime.net/misc/Alan_Moore_201712.jpg" alt=""></p>
<p>My actual condition was that I was in a bleak, no-hope situ
The Jodhpur Slippershttp://www.yunchtime.net/TRAVELS/The-Jodhpur-Slippers/2018-09-21T04:00:00.000Z2018-09-20T02:44:48.180Z

Heinrich Zimmer wrote an interesting psychological interpretation of the classic fable, “Abu Kasem’s Slippers,” collected in his book The King and the Corpse. In that tale, the successful businessman is such a cheapskate that he will not part with his ancient, ragged and disgusting slippers.

In the course of the fable, Abu Kasem is foolish enough to think that someone in the public bath has taken away his worn out slippers and replaced them with a gift: a resplendent new pair of the finest quality. As he walks merrily away in those elegant slippers, he is arrested for having stolen them from the Caliph!

Foolish Kasem! Nobody was granting him a kindness. In fact, they were playing a prank on him by hiding his old and disgusting footwear. In a series of bizarre incidents, Kasem is tormented by the slippers that always return to him, no matter how he tries to rid himself of them. Like a bad penny, those slippers always turn up!

On this equinox of 2018, I am thinking about this tale for many reasons. It has been a 20 year long arc for me, forming the beginning and now (apparently) the end of my professional career. One significance of 1998, is that it was the year I finished my M.A. degree in Chinese language, and also the year I completed a Fulbright Scholarship at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. It was definitely a time of new beginnings, as I worked as an admin assistant at MIT, while at the same time launching my own consulting business.

With a boundless energy, I was able to promote my idea of combining Chinese history, geography, indexing, and databases. Before long, I was being invited to the academic realm, where a ferment to develop digital projects was rampant. Amazingly, I was able to trade in my lifelong anxiety about not knowing where my next meal was coming from, to having actual job offers, first at MIT, then a few years later, at Harvard.

Just before starting my career at Harvard, I also took a vacation to Rajasthan, India, where I visited the magical city of Udaipur, and then spent the night in something equivalent to a dog kennel at the Jain Temple in Ranakpur. After that, it was on to Jodhpur, the mystical blue city spread out below an invulnerable cliff-top castle.

As I wandered around the market square of fabled Jodhpur, choking on dust as thick as New Brunswick fog, I happened upon a shoe shop that must have supplied all the characters in the 1,001 nights. Great golden boats with cresent moons for toes! Flat open-toed sandals with sparse, braided toe holds – they could have been in fashion since the dawn of time. And most fabulous of all: racks and racks of hand-embroidered camel-skin slippers as soft as chamois, and hand-stitched with unbreakable white leather ligatures. The colors were as subtle as lavendar and jasmine. The styles were as primordial as the pyramids.

Without hesitating, I bought a pair that fit me perfectly, decorated with delightful turqoise green plants and their burgundy flowers.

I’ve been wearing these slippers ever since. For eighteen straight years, I would sooner lose my mind than these slippers from Jodhpur.

And yet. Here we are. It is 2018, and that long career arc that began 20 years ago has reached its denouement. I’ve ridden that crazy horse as far across the desert as it could go, and finally had to put it out of it’s misery and move on.

Now I’m in a sort of final lap, in a different role at Harvard. The academic appointment I received is certainly an honor. And I was lucky to even have the chance to take that final lap and make it to the finish line.

But my soul is out there wandering. The time has come to molt. Time to shed the last snake-skin and fly away on newly minted blue-scaled wings, searing the landscape with an occasional Godzilla blast of orange hellfire.

It’s been a good journey, but it’s time to ride off into the sunset. It’s time to hang up the Stetson and the six-gun, and get back to the raw land, with nothing but a canteen and a bowie knife.

And yeah, even the slippers must go! The Jodhpur Slippers – bless ‘em – are taking their last tango on the roofbeams, howling their last caterwail at the full moon. If you hang onto something forever, you end up haunting yourself. So time to chuck out what you came to know and trust.

Take the plunge into a totally new realm of existence, where there is neither guide, nor beaten path to follow. But that’s a good thing. No worries. When you wake up transformed, whether you are Gregor Samsa or Sleeping Beauty doesn’t make a bit of difference. The only thing that really matters is to break through the delusional state to your true Identity. On the bakelite surface of the farthest mesa, with volcano rocks and pinon bushes a mile apart, the falling tower of a shattered ego consciousness just crackles like thin glass. There is a vacuum that rises up into the purple depths of the sky. Nothing is there to replace false consciousness with another mask. Nothing is ringing your skull like a bell, demanding another chance. Nope, it’s the last song on the jukebox; a tune that Jason Taverner probably sang to himself just before he remembered who he was and shook off the amnesia.

You can say adios to many things, most of them with good riddance. It’s okay about the Jodhpur Slippers. They served well. They kicked ass in the realm of the gods, and never strayed from the high road. For that you can only be amazed and thankful.

It’s almost primary election day here in Massachusetts, and voters in the urban 8th Congressional District, have a unique choice in this ever stranger year of 2018.

The incumbent has been in office since 1994, and is considered the most “socially conservative” member of the Massachusetts Democratic caucus in Washington.

But this is a new reality in the 8th District, we also have a woman running for office for the first time, who is really worth checking out! Brianna ‘Spacekat’ Wu stands 100% for women’s reproductive rights, for net neutrality, for workers rights, for keeping families together, and for a better, more equitable America.

Think about it! You can help send a real human being to D.C. who is a self-motivated entrepreneur, technologist, programmer, and creator… Instead of the stinking trough of gobbling pigs that we have had for the last, oh, 150 years or so. (If you think I am kidding about that, just read two books by Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons and The Politicos … then tell me what you think about it.)

I’ve been supporting Brianna since her nascent campaign was hatched, and her husband, Frank Wu, regaled me with the idea. (If you know Frank, regale is the proper verb here.) Now just WATCH THE CAMPAIGN VIDEO if you haven’t yet!

And, though Brianna has been consistently treated like some interloper in the campaign, she Never gives up! And now she has released what I think is a kick ass election eve campaign video.

All, I can say is, when you go the voting booth on Tuesday, think about this video and who you want in Washington D.C. when you need to call your representative there.

Francesco Verso’s Livido won the Best Italian Science Fiction Award in 2014. Now the book is being released in English as Nexhuman by Apex Books.

In this book, Verso takes us for a journey into the mind and the soul, and into the zone between fear and wonder. The protagonist of the book lives in a world of endless consumerism, where human beings are capable of migrating into post-human mechanical forms.

In such a world, where practical survival leads to brutality and indifference, what does it mean to be free, and to follow one’s own dream?

In this free-form interview, Francesco Verso, explores the topics of transhumanism, consumer culture, and the philosophical aspects of Nexhuman. He also discusses his work in the context of English language publications and the emergence of global voices in Science Fiction, including his own anthology, called Future Fiction, which was co-edited by Bill Campbell and published by Rosarium Press.

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<p><img src="http://www.yunchtime.net/misc/verso_futurefic_nexhuman.jpg" alt=""></p>
<font size="-1"><em>Future Fiction (Rosarium Press, 201
Unraveling the Mysteries of Medieval Chinese Spells and Amuletshttp://www.yunchtime.net/IDEAS/Unraveling-Medieval-Chinese-Spells-and-Amulets/2018-08-04T20:15:32.000Z2018-08-05T20:46:40.202ZIt’s great when one of your class-mates in college goes on to achieve well-deserved recognition. Such is the case for my cohort, Paul Copp, who was in the Chinese M.A. program with me at UMASS Amherst back in the 90s. Now he is a faculty member at the University of Chicago, and several years ago he had his major work on the magical spells of medieval Chinese Buddhism published by Columbia University Press.

Now I finally got around to reading his book, The Body Incantatory, and am quite pleased to discover how perfectly readable it is, despite having considerable heft as a scholarly examination of medieval Chinese Buddhism in it’s own right. The book takes an orthogonal approach to the topic, by following the trail of dhāraṇī spells as it weaves through the various sects, practices, and religions of China.

Woodblock print of Amitābha, seated within a square of Sanskrit text (dhāraṇī), from Qianfo Dong, Cave 17 (c) British Museum

From the introduction we discover: “the details of Chinese Buddhist spell craft reveal veins in the Buddhist tradition — as well as commonalities among traditions — that are otherwise difficult to see. Despite their near invisibility in modern scholarship on Chinese Buddhism, the medieval Chinese Buddhists used (chanted, read, touched) dhāraṇīs and mantras nearly every day. This fact allows us to cut accross conceptual terrain of seeing Chinese Buddhism prinicipally in terms of doctrines, schools, festivals, deity cults, or sacred locales.Spell practices offer their own maps. (preface, xvi)

But what are dhāraṇīs and how do they work? In the most basic sense, dhāraṇīs are spoken spells, similar to (and sometimes acting as) mantras; the prayers and invocations used in Buddhist meditation practice. In this book, Copp examines the meaning of dhāraṇī at great length, providing many examples of how the word was explained in historical texts, such as in “The Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom” [Dazhidu lun]:

The dhāraṇī is alternately “able to grasp” (nengchi), or “able to block” (nengzhe). As for being able to grasp, once one has collected all manner of good dharmas, one is able to keep hold of them so that they do not scatter or become lost. As for being able to block, the evil roots that [are wont to be] born in the mind are blocked and not born. If there is the desire to commit evil deeds, one will take hold and not allow onself to commit them. This is called “dhāraṇī.” (p. 22)

More saliently for me, personally, is:

the dhāraṇī of entering sounds. The bodhisattva who attains this dhāraṇī will feel neither joy nor antipathy upon hearing the sounds of speech. Even if all beings were to speak foully and curse them for kalpas innumerous as the sands of the Ganges, their hearts would not be angered. They rid themselves of angry thoughts by thinking:“If my ears had not encountered it, to whom would this foul sound attach?”. (p. 24)

In addition to a careful and penetrating analysis into the origins of the dhāraṇīs in Chinese history and their connections to Chinese religions, the Body Incantatory is primarily concerned with the practice of dhāraṇīs in daily life, such as writing the spoken dhāraṇī spells onto paper and braiding them to be worn as bracelets, or burning them and anointing one’s body with their ash, or writing the spells on one’s flesh in oil, blood, or herbal concoctions.

Copp argues that “more important than echoes of imperial practice… were connections with the broad and ancient family of Chinese amulets and talismans, a family that includedmedicinal drugs, alchemical elixirs, mirrors, fu-talismans, seals, and of course scriptures and spells.”. (p. 47)

In the midst of these colorful explorations of dhāraṇī practices, Copp also fills his narrative with numerous asides on topics such as the rich tradition of “travel magic.” Since the creators of these dhāraṇī techniques had to venture into the wilds in search of spirits and magical substances, and consequently had much to fear from demonic machinations in remote places, the importance of travel magic is not surprising.

The middle section of the Body Incantatory examines the archeological evidence of how Buddhist dhāraṇīs were used in the form of protective spells and amulets. Copp explains in great detail the discovery of several major finds. One of these was a Tang Dynasty tomb excavated in 1944 on the campus of Sichuan University, in Chengdu. In the tomb they found a skeleton still wearing a silver arm-band that concealed a tightly rolled up printed dhāraṇī amulet.

Copp also provides a variety of interpretive studies of the amulets, their composition, their visual design, their self-containment or relationship to the bearer of the spells, and their context in the larger sphere of Buddhist printed matter, mandalas, sutras, and shrine objects. How fascinating to think about dhāraṇī pillars, with their special connections to wind, to shadow, and to dust. Spells are not only spoken by human beings, but are swirling around us in multi-valent and mysterious ways!

This is further explored in the “Transmission of the Mystic Store” [Chuan mizang] by the monk Zanning, in which he says that the old translation of dhāraṇī was “to grasp” and the new translation is “nature.” In essence, the connection of the spell to the practitioner has swung from one’s own voice to the music of the spheres, from one’s own mental projections to the very forces of Nature in the Universe around us.

For anyone interested in the practices of spell casters in Medieval times, or interested in Buddhist iconography, rituals, and daily practice, this book will provide you many new and fascinating examples. For those students and practitioners of Buddhism who have traveled through the mountains of doctrines, and been lost in forests of sutras, gong-ans, mantras, and symbology, you will be delighted to find whole new realms to explore. The title, as one expects from a wordsmith such as Paul Copp, does the book justice; it is indeed a Body Incantatory, it is an incantation embodied, and a transcendental magick unraveled from small bits of ancient religious emphemera.

“It is proper here to speak of the imagination of “incantatory bodies.” Here I mean both the tales of thetransformed bodies of the practitionersand theincantatory “bodies” of sound, light, and substance — the spells themselves — that were said to enable these transformations.” (p. 145)

As the philosopher and sorcerer Allyn B. Brodsky would have pointed out, this dual aspect of the transformed Self and the spells themselves, is one facet of the ego / identity interface. At that interface, the manifestation of our mental energies and intentions will interact with the perceived Universe into which they have been cast. Identity, then is a sort of a spell, an incantation, an invocation of who we wish to be and who we perceive ourselves to be. Until, of course, the blasted tower smashes such fragile shells to pieces, and the ego starts all over again.

In the pages of The Body Incantatory, hermetic circles are drawn, deities invoked, elixirs quaffed, and thunderbolts thrown. Stir up a nice cool batch of elixir vitae, and take a tour of medieval spell casting in this remarkable and delightful book.

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<p>It’s great when one of your class-mates in college goes on to achieve well-deserved recognition. Such is the case for my cohort, <a href
Time Travel in Parishttp://www.yunchtime.net/ARTS/Time-travel-in-Paris/2018-05-28T04:00:00.000Z2018-08-11T21:12:53.333ZPainting (c) Todd Schorr

Lisa Goldstein’s first novel, The Red Magician, won the National Book Award in 1983, in the category for “original paperback novel.” Strangely that is the only year that category existed, which means that Goldstein is the only person to have ever won that particular award.

In her second novel, Goldstein wrote a time travel fantasy set in Paris, called The Dream Years. In this story, a group of surrealists that formed around André Breton (circa 1924) become inexplicably entwined with the protest and rebellion of les barricades (circa May 1968). As I was reading, I found myself wondering time and again if, somehow Goldstein’s novel provided inspiration for Woody Allen’s time-travel film, Midnight in Paris.

Let’s take a few concrete examples.

1) Time travel

First, the main concept of The Dream Years is that a young woman, who is a leader of the Paris protests in May 1968 discovers passages in time that enable her to go backwards to the 1920s in search of the surrealists. Ostensibly she is doing this because she is in need of the surrealists to fight against the establishment; they are the only ones with enough vision and anti-authoritarian energy to succeed.

However, the story begins in the 1920s, from the point of view of a young writer, Robert St. Onge, who is a member of Breton’s surrealist gang, and when he encounters this mysterious girl from the future he becomes intrigued, then enraptured by her.

This is very much like the main character in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, Gil Pender, who is an American writer, entranced by the idea that he can live and work in Paris. He is especially in love with the Paris of the 1920s and accidentally finds a way to travel back in time to actually experience that time and place.

Gil Pender, dreaming of the past

2) Writing a novel

In The Dream Years, the protagonist, Robert, has a troubled relationship with the most important person in his life, André Breton. Breton is charismatic, and dedicated to the credo of surrealism, but he is also didactic, and declares only poetry to be worth writing, while scorning novels as rubbish of the middle class consciousness. Robert discovers that he wants to write a novel, and fights with Breton over this, with Breton going to far as to tear up pages of Robert’s manuscript.

In Midnight in Paris, the writer, Gil, is successful at writing screenplays, but his true passion is to write a novel, which he works on in fits and starts, wracked by self-doubts. Gil struggles with the most important person in his life, his fiancé, as well as her wealthy parents, who are focused on money and consider Gil’s artistic ambitions to be ridiculous.

Gil Pender’s manuscript

3) The Antique Seller

In The Dream Years the woman from the future appears suddenly in the life of the writer, then vanishes, leaving Robert to wonder who she was and how he might find her. Robert then encounters a color photograph of the same woman on the cover of a record album at an antique stall along the Left Bank. He is fascinated by the color photo (which he assumed is hand-tinted), and the single word on the record sleeve, Solange, which he assumes is the name of the woman. But after a night of drunken surrealist debates, he loses track of the record album. Later, the album is returned and he discovers that when playing it, there is no sound.

In Midnight in Paris, Gil Pender has an experience of traveling into the past and spends a wild and drunken night with his favorite people of the past, (including Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerlad, Cole Porter). Back in the present time, he wanders around the stalls along the Left Bank, and finds an antique stall where he finds an original recording of Cole Porter from the period that he just visited. He buys the record from Gabrielle, who works at the antique stall. The record can only be played on the old gramophone at the antique stall.

The record at the antique stall

4) The Woman of Mystery

In The Dream Years, the woman of the future is, in fact, named Solange, and she is part of the exciting days of rebellion known as Mai 1968. Robert, the writer, becomes entranced by Solange and travels with her through time to appear on the barricades, in the running battles between protesters and police. In essence, Solange has sought out allies in the battle between authoritarian political power and the new reality that the protesters are dreaming of. As it turns out, she must send Robert back to his own time, where he dreams of finding her again.

In Midnight in Paris, the woman of the past, named Adriana, encounters Gil Pender at the home of Gertude Stein, where she is in the middle of a tumultuous relationship with Pablo Picasso. Gil, smitten, nonetheless backs away from the woman of mystery, with the idea that he can fetch the manuscript of his novel for Gertrude Stein to critique it. Gil fetches his manuscript and desperately tries to revisit the past and find Adriana again.

The woman of mystery

5) The Double Time Warp

In The Dream Years, it turns out that the May 1968 protests are shut down by the reactionary establishment. But then, there are evil forces at work, which cause a more serious war to break out in the future. Moving farther into the future, Solange engages the surrealists into that future crisis, pitting their dissociation from reality against the combined forces of authoritarianism and larger forms of ambient evil in the Universe. In short, the surrealists from the 1920s visit not only the 1960s rebellion, but a rebellion much farther into the future.

In Midnight in Paris it turns out that the woman of mystery, Adriana, similar to Gil Pender, is also in love with the past. For Adriana, the perfect world existed in La Belle Epoque of the late 19th Century to the early years of the 20th Century. One evening, as Gil and Adriana become more deeply involved, they travel even farther into the past, into Adriana’s dreamed-of Belle Epoque where they visit Le Moulin Rouge and take up a conversation with Toulouse Latrec.

Farther back in time, at Moulin Rouge

Exploring these strange parallels between Lisa Goldstein’s novel and Woody Allen’s movie is not meant to detract from either work. In fact, Midnight in Paris is one of my favorite films of recent years, which I will probably watch again multiple times (despite the sort of creepy, odious feeling I get whenever I think about Allen as a human being).

Indeed, Woody Allen’s script, elaborates a very different cast of characters, the writers, artists, and bon vivants of the Paris 1920s. Interestingly, in Midnight in Paris there is no overlap at all with the surrealists that Lisa Goldstein wrote about: Antonin Artaud, André Breton, Paul Éluard, who were all directly involved with the Bureau of Surrealist Research.

Allen chooses more colorful characters and places them in random gatherings of pure genius. When Gil Pender despondently confesses his “problem” over a glass of wine with Salvador Dalí, it is golden moment; and then Dalí’s best friends, Luis Buñuel and Man Ray walk in!

They each appraise Pender’s problem. Man Ray says the problem is “a photograph,” while Buñuel insists that the problem is “a film.” Dalí gets the last word: Pender’s problem is “a rhinocerous!”

Your problem is a rhinocerous!

This stuff is terrific! Despite some similarities to Goldstein’s book, Allen’s film is certainly a love story. It is a romantic adventure for the protagonist, who casts off the expectations of society to pursue his own dream. Paris in the rain. And to follow one’s dream, is to find true love… or so the story goes.

When I was reading The Dream Years I couldn’t help noticing that there were some really hard to explain common threads with Midnight in Paris. Is there any direct connection? Who knows! But interesting all the same, and even more interesting if they occurred by accident. Stranger things have happened.

The prolific author, Ahmed Khaled Towfik, passed away from a heart attack on April 2nd, 2018. Although I had encountered his books occasionally in passing, I have yet to read any of them, including “Utopia“ or his other works that have been translated into English.

The announcement of his passing, in a comment by German author Cora Buhlert on File770, contained a link to an excellent memorial essay on the author over at Sindbad Sci-Fi. The memorial essay helps to frame Towfik’s work in Egyptian and Arabic-reading context:

“His influence on Egypt’s zeitgeist cannot be emphasised enough; he was regarded a public intellectual as much as a pillar of SF literature, frequently hailed by Egyptians as the ‘Godfather of popular culture’. Through his writing, he showed unwavering dedication to mentoring a generation of younger fans who had brought him fame and success.

The outpouring of affection from Egyptians mourning his loss is not just because he was a talented writer. To the humble masses, he was a relatable, friendly figure who stood up against social injustice and oppressive dictatorship.

For Tawfik, the realm of Sci-Fi was a catharsis to safely vent his deep frustration with politics, poverty and class divisions. He ingeniously mastered the craft of dystopia as an allegorical tool to make a scathing commentary on Egypt’s status quo whilst averting censorship.”Yasmin Khan, Sindbad Sci-Fi

This memorial contains links to interviews with Towfik, including a long recording of an event held at the British Library as part of the Shubbak Festival held in 2015. The interviewer was Yasmin Kahn, the editor of Sindbad Sci-Fi, which itself is an incredible resource, highly recommended to SFF fans everywhere.

Towfik interviewed via Skype by Yasmin Khan at Shubbak Festival 2015

Taking a look at Towfik’s listing on Goodreads, even without knowing Arabic, you can enjoy browsing through some of his interesting works. For example, there are 64 books listed in the series called Supernatural.

A book rack featuring the Supernatural Series

Hopefully, some more translations and descriptions about these books will appear in English soon!

The Blue Flame, Supernatural Series, No. 13.

Another series, called Safari, has another 53 listings, and equally intriguing entries.

The Master of Genes, Safari Series, No. 41.

In addition to these series, which seem to be in the YA category, Towfik also wrote three volumes of a series of strange and horrific stories called Now We Open the Box.

“Now We Open the Box” volume 2.

The first book by Towfik translated into English is Utopia, which has an intriguing cover on one of it’s Arabic editions.

“Utopia”

It is regrettable that I only took a closer look at my Egyptian cohort, Ahmed Khaled Towfik, after he has passed away at the age of 55!

May he rest in peace and may his works continute to find new audiences and inspire authors in who write SFF in Arabic.

There is something fascinating, unfathomable, and mystifying about the Caucasus Mountains, and the peoples there, scattered among the modern nations of Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and spilling across the borders into Russian Dagestan, Ossetia, Chechnya, as well as into Turkey and Iran.

Ancient mystical knowledge seems to flow from the hidden valleys, protected by layers of fierce local tribes and impenetrable customs. Residing in the open country and the high mountains where others feared to tread, the many peoples of the Caucusus region were reputed to be bandits and savage fighters, while at the same time famous for their courtesy and curiosity for all travelers from foreign lands.

Codes of honor bound people to their lineages and their lands, and grievances between tribes of different ethnicities and religions were handled by the atamans, the clan chiefs, according to age-old traditions.

What strange forces percolate up from the hills and across the treacherous mountain paths to bring so many seekers and tribes together?

From the Southern flank of the Lower Caucusus, stretch the Alborz Mountains of Iran, the actual lair of Hasan-i Sabah and his fanatical followers, the hashshashin.

Engraving of the Elder from the Mountains, as Hassan-i Sabbah was called, 19th century.

Hasan-i Sabah’s mountain fortress at Alamut was the headquarters of the Shi’a Nizari Ismai’lis during the 11th and 12th Centuries. ‘The fortress was thought impregnable to any military attack, and was fabled for its heavenly gardens, library, and laboratories where philosophers, scientists, and theologians could debate in intellectual freedom.’Wikipedia

In 1256, Ruknu-d-Dīn Khurshāh surrendered the fortress to the invading Mongols, and its famous library holdings were destroyed. Was this the secret library and tradition of the Ancient Ones?

Why are the Caucusus like a vortex of intense mysticism and spirituality? Is it the unspoiled and rugged terrain, which only the strongest and most desperate of souls can survive?

It is here that Gurdjieff was born, shortly after the Circassian - Russian War, in the Russian-controlled city Alexandropol of Eastern Armenia. Brought up in the Christian tradition, the young Gurdjieff considered becoming a priest, before his quest for mystical knowledge propeled him outside of the Church and onto a life quest for mystical truth.

The story of Gurdjieff’s youthful quest is told in his autobiographical book, Meetings with Remarkable Men, in which he spins fabulous tales about his encounters with members of a secret brotherhood who are all seekers of truth. Gurdjieff claims that his wanderings led him to travel to Central Asia, Egypt, Iran, India, and even Tibet. Gurdjieff claimed that he eventually found the secret monastery where the ancient teachings of the Essenes were preserved by the Sarmoung Brotherhood.

The Seal of the Sarmoung Brotherhood

Among the sacred rites of the Sarmoung Brothers and Sisters, were complicated forms of ritual dance, and so it is not so surprising to find that in the early years after his mystical quest, Gurdjieff became the organizer of ballet and dance performances in Moscow, while at the same time gathering disciples into a mystical school. The complex, early teachings of the school, focused on the body, mind, and spirit being simultaneously advanced towards higher consciousness. The combination of all three factors became known as The Fourth Way.

The influence that Gurdjieff had on the movements of “alternative spirituality” in the early 20th Century cannot be overlooked. His origins in the Caucusus and his far-flung quest for mystical truth, provided grist for the mills of the Theosophists, and a host of other knowledge seekers.

The film adaption of Meetings with Remarkable Men), by British director, Peter Brook, is an inspiring production, that follows the young Gurdjieff from childhood through his mystical revelations and journeys. The evocative scenes (filmed in Afghanistan), capture some of the feeling of a lost world of traditional mountain tribes.

The music in the film is also quite good, weaving in and out of the scenes with sinuous presence, it helps to transport the viewer along the labyrinthine route of Gurdjieff’s singular quest.

Another nice thing about this film is the pacing, which is both sedate and yet enervating, driven by the passionate quest for secret knowledge that forces the protagonist to undertake all sorts of mad adventures and risks. Only rare moments of insight provide the sustenance for the hero to continue his journey, as in the scene with the Prince Lubovedsky in Egypt, who is another seeker of the high road.

“Yes, Professor, thinking and knowing are quite different.”

Peter Brook is a brilliant director, by all rights, (his play Marat Sade is an unparalled classic; and his film version of King Lear is pretty damn good, too); but in this film he manages to imbue the story with the raw feeling of Gurdjieff’s path.

Yet another oddity of the spiritual quest in the Caucusus is seen in Sergey Panjarov’s The Color of Pomegranates, (1969), which portrays the inner life of an 18th Century Armenian Poet, Sayat Nova.

Նռան գույնը (The Color of Pomegranates, 1969)

This bizarre and purely symbolic film is sometimes heralded as the “best film ever made.” For example, Martin Scorcese, who was instrumental in the film being restored and released on DVD in 2015, had this to say:

“Watching Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates is like opening a door and walking into another dimension, where time has stopped and beauty has been unleashed. On a very basic level, it’s a biography of the Armenian poet Sayat Nova, but before all else it’s a cinematic experience, and you come away remembering images, repeated expressive movements, costumes, objects, compositions, colours.”

If you think of it as a long, slowly evolving image, in which symbolic representations of a poet’s suffering are rendered in heavy, ponderous posturings, then you will get the most out of it.

Woman in the mausoleum (The Color of Pomegranates, 1969)

The drummer and the dancing child (The Color of Pomegranates, 1969)

The golden icon frame (The Color of Pomegranates, 1969)

For others, including me, there were just too many scenes of heavy-handed religiosity, crowds of sheep, hands over faces, seashells on breasts, rivulets of red (like blood, but maybe pomogranates!); and it was just a bit too much.

If the music had been something like the eerie and sad duduk of Djivan Gasparyan, I might have had a really different experience. Maybe I will try to watch this Panjarov film again, silently.

I can’t help wonder if there isn’t something in the soil of the Caucusus that drives people to ponderous spiritual journeys. It’s like a magnet for the soul-searching madness.

Of course, maybe it helps to have Mount Ararat smack in the middle as well. Tim Powers had a bunch of fun with that setting in his dark magic and espionage novel, Declare.

There is something in that soil, or that water, or that brandy from the vines of the Caucusus.

As Gurdjieff himself said, in Tales of Beelzebub’s Grandson:

“And now, before setting to work on the second series of my writings, inorder to give it a form accessible to everyone, I intend to rest for a wholemonth, to write absolutely nothing and, for a stimulus to my organism,fatigued to the extreme limit, slow-ly to drink the still remaining fifteenbottles of “super-most-super heavenly nectar” which at the present time isknown on Earth as “Old Calvados.”This Old Calvados, by the way—twenty-seven bottles of it—I wasconsidered worthy to find by accident buried under a mixture of lime, sand,and finely chopped straw, several years ago when I was digging a pit forstoring carrots for the winter in one of the cellars of my present chief dwellingplace.The bottles of this divine liquid were buried in all probability by monkswho had lived in this place, far from worldly temptations, for the salvation oftheir souls.It now seems to me that it was not without some ulterior motive that theyburied these bottles there, and that, by virtue of what is called their “intuitiveperspicacity”—the data for which, one must assume, were formed in themthanks to their pious lives—they foresaw that this divine liquid would fall intohands worthy of understanding the meaning of such things, and that it wouldstimulate the owner of these hands to sustain the meaning of the ideals onwhich the corporation of these monks was founded and assist their bettertransmission to the next generation.During this rest of mine, fully deserved from any point of view, I wish todrink this splendid liquid, which alone during recent years has given me thepossibility of tolerating, without suffering, beasts similar to myself around me,and to listen to new anecdotes, and sometimes for lack of new ones, oldones—provided, of course, that the storyteller is a good one.”

The novel “темпоград” by Георгий Гуревич Georgii Gurevich is quite intriguing. When I saw the cover posted on the twitter feed of Vladimir Poleganov @innerkosmos I tried to find out more, only to discover that no English translation exists.

According to Fantlab, Tempograd is about a crisis on the planet Toi, where the native sun will explode in two months. To solve urgent scientific and technical problems in the face of this disaster, a microscopic town of Tempograd is created, where its inhabitants live in accelerated time: for each normal day they have a year in Tempograd, and so two months are stretched out into 60 years.

Gurevich was actually quite prolific, as it turns out. Born in Moscow in 1917, he originally studied architecture and then served in the Red Army throughout WWII (from 1939 to 1945). Somehow he emerged from the war in one piece, despite having been in the cavalry and worked as a sapper, and then after the war he worked as a civil engineer.

Gurevich became a great evangelist for popularizing science, through radio broadcasts, science fiction stories, and popular science books.

Indeed, the only English translation of Gurevich’s science fiction that I could find was “Infra Draconis,” which ISFDB listed in the 1962 Collier edition of Soviet Science Fiction.

Aha! I grabbed my copy of that delightful book off the shelf!

Now I remember the story, “Infra Draconis,” a tale of interplantary adventure and alien encounters. It’s actually a delightful read, and manages to pack more science and engineering details into its twenty pages than many novels.

Written at the dawn of the space age, “Infra Draconis” has a tall tale feeling reminiscent of R. A. Lafferty. The characters are space-faring scientists and engineers, yet they also sound like farmers hanging around the tool shed at the summer dacha. The six-member crew blasts off in search of the infra star, the low energy suns like brown dwarves that cannot be seen due the intensity of our own sun.

You have to admire Gurevich’s down-beat style. American writers would be all over the blasting of rockets, the violence of sudden acceleration, and the majesty of insterstellar travel. “Infra Draconis” has none of that:

Then came the monotonous days of our everyday life, which the writers omit from their descriptions. A tiny sleeping-cabin, three meters by three, hammocks, a table, a cupboard. Beyond its wall, a work-room just a trifle larger containing a telescope, the control panel, instruments, computers.

If you like, you can get into a flying suit and tumble about in space. Then once more the hammock, the table and cupboard. In fact – a prison cell. Three years in solitary confinement.

Unlike the romanticized versions of adventure in space, Gurevich doesn’t cut any slack. Space: it’s a drag. It’s endless, cold, and lethal, so just get used to it!

Not that Gurevich can’t appreciate the beauty of outer space. His opening paragraph combines the simple optics of orbiting a dark world with the majestic feel of the deep space sky.

A black circle floats over the shining sea of stars – a matte saucer with rather misty edges. At one edge the stars are eclipsed, only to be born again at the other edge half an hour later. Familiar constellations, only here they are brighter and their pattern more complicated and delicate. Only one of them – the Flying Fish – has an extra star, the brightest in the sky, the most beautiful – our own sun.

Definitely worth checking out more by Georgii Gurevich. Too bad his works have yet to be translated.

“Throughout the history of Science Fiction and Fantasy literature, women writers have pushed the boundaries of the genre to probe topics at the edge of the human imagination. This panel of three accomplished writers explores the world of women in science fiction by focusing on the reasons for their choice of genre, themes, characters, and plot in their fiction as well as the particular challenges they face publishing science fiction literature.”

To find out more about the Hong Kong Science Fiction and Fantasy scene, Yunchtime reached out to Dr. Christine Yi Lai Luk, at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences of the Univeristy of Hong Kong, who attended the panel discussion.

YUNCHTIME: How did the seminar and panel discussion live up to the proposed topic?

LUK: There is plenty of room for improvement, I’d say. It is a panel of three women SF writers, but they did not explore “the world of women in SF” as advertised in the above description. It is more appropriate to call the seminar “women/gender and SF” because it is just three women talking about their SF work.

YUNCHTIME: How about the panelists, can you describe briefly some of their thoughts or comments?

LUK: I think Becky Chambers‘ views were the most relevant to the proposed topic. Chambers revealed how she was drawn into the world of SF from an early age onward. Raised in a space science-heavy family (her father is a rocket engineer and her mother an astrobiologist), she was introduced to SF and space fantasy movies as early as she could remember.

Her favorite SF novel of all time is “The Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula LeGuin (a lot of nods from the audience as the name was dropped). She said writing SF gives her confidence as she is an introvert.

I think her experience reflects a certain gender norm in the SF realm: Unlike the blondy sorority type of girls, girls who are into SF are perceived as shy and nerdy, and incapable of drawing the attention from the opposite sex (except maybe from Wookie-dressed superfans).

Tang Fei does not write in English, only in Chinese. Her Chinese works are translated into English and they draw attention in the English-speaking world partly because her works are banned in China. Actually, Tang Fei is a pen name.

Because the conference was being held entirely in English and due to the language barrier, Tang Fei’s sharing was not effective as we could have hoped. She only managed to say a few sentences in English (with a very soft voice). Then, during the Q&A, she was relying on the organizer, Nicole Huang, to act as her interpreter.

The main thing I caught from Tang Fei is that in the future, human beings will exist in disembodied form and thus the only “gender” issue for SF writers to engage in will be purely on the psychological aspect.

Zen Cho talked about her upbringing in Malaysia and her identity as an English-speaking Hokkien among mainstream Malays. She did not identify herself as a SF writer, but as a fantasy writer. I don’t think she has said anything remotely relevant to gender.

YUNCHTIME: In the U.S. the “gender” topic these days typically encompasses a wider net of not only gender but sexuality, including male, female, cis, gender neutral, lgbt, androgyny, and so on. In this panel discussion the title mentions “gender” but the compostion of the panel, and the description seems to be female-centric. Was the panel actual more of a feminist gender panel?.

LUK:It is very female-centric. There isn’t any discussion whatsoever on homosexuality or heteronormativity. They didn’t talk about how being female inspire their creative writings. On the other hand, Chambers discussed how SF was related to the US bipartisan politics.

YUNCHTIME: How are the related issues of transgender, body modification, transhumanism percieved in Hong Kong?

LUK: Body politics is getting more attention in the Hong Kong society these days. Taiwan’s announcement of the legalization of same-sex marriage is a wake-up call for Hong Kong. I’d say Hong Kong as a whole is rather conservative. A sizable set of the population (mostly the elderly) still condemn and even criminalize homosexual behaviors.

YUNCHTIME: How about your own views on gender in Science Fiction and Fantasy? Do you think that gender roles are changing and the ways they are depicted in genre also changing with the times?

LUK: I think changes are afoot. Women used to be depicted as nurturing, loving, pretty (see how the female crews from Star Trek: The Original Series were dressed in mini-skirts and go-go boots and filmed with soft lights?) while men are depicted as rational, heroic, and strong. But compared to this old gender norm, women are now portrayed differently.

In episode 1, season 4 of Black Mirror, the leading female character is smart, strong, pretty, and hell-bent on leading the crew (created involuntarily by DNA cloning) to escape from the fantasy space-ship dictated by the male protagonist. Film critics credited this episode as “how women navigate male entitlement in geek culture,” and “a searing and surprising indictment of toxic masculinity.”

Shifting the lens to China, the protagonist in Cixin Liu’s award-winning “Three-Body Problem” is a female astrophysicist, who is the first contact person with the leader of ETO. Not to mention the fact that most leading characters in Hayao Miyazaki’s animations are female. There are also several relevant articles linking Miyazaki’s fantasy films with feminism:

YUNCHTIME: What about your own work? Have you explored these gender issues, for example in the history of science?

LUK: Not really. Previously I had explored this topic a bit in research for my master’s degree on the topic of under-representation of women in science and engineering but that’s more a sociological study without much historical analysis.

YUNCHTIME: You also worked on the use of animal subjects for scientific research in orbital space missions. And I saw that one of the speakers at the Melon Conference was Lisa Nip (of MIT) who studies the evolution of biological organisms for living in outer space. It’s interesting to me that more women are working in scientific and academic fields on projects that seem to be the very stuff of science fiction. Do these science fictional themes influence your writing?

LUK: Well, I am so not on a par with Nip. In fact, I have never written a SF novel. I wanted to but never gotten the time and determination to do it. I am more like a hobbyist, teetering on the margin of SF fandom when in comes to this kind of writing.

YUNCHTIME: After living in the U.S. for a number of years, then moving back to Hong Kong, did you have a culture shock? Does Hong Kong seem like an sfnal space?

LUK: Haha, it does feel strange to move back. After 6 and a half years living in AZ, I need to readjust to the urban living cruelty, the ubiquitous humidity, and the local politics on a day-to-day basis. People assume that I will be happy to move to my home town and be with my family. Truth is, I miss having a spacious, affordable residence in a sparsely populated town. In Hong Kong, this is a dream.

Whenever I am sitting on the upper deck of a double-decker bus, I feel like I am flying past all the vertical high-rise buildings and heading towards that tiny spot in mid-air. You are right, HK does seem like a science-fictional space, because it is so vertical and vision-blocking that you need some imagination to get some insights here.

Thanks very much to our colleague and fellow SF fan, Dr. Christine Luk for her reportage!

On March 17th, 2018, Melon Conference 2 was held in Hong Kong. In this interview, the author and keynote speaker at the conference, Allen Steele, shares his thoughts on the current state of SFF in Hong Kong and China today.

“Melon is Hong Kong’s preeminent ideas festival focused on science fiction, innovation and the future. A gathering of leading science fiction writers, acclaimed scientists, media industry experts and fans to discuss what’s next in science fiction, entrepreneurship and the most compelling trends facing our future.”

YUNCHTIME: Greetings, Allen! Welcome back from Hong Kong and China. Was this your first trip to Hong Kong?

STEELE: It was my first trip to Hong Kong, and also my first trip to Asia. My wife had been to this side of the world before, when she visited Nepal and Thailand in the 90’s, but until now the farthest I’ve gone from home has been France and Germany.

So it was an eye-opening experience to visit first Hong Kong, which is a futuristic global city where all kinds of cultures are present and, so far as I can tell, part of an emerging Asia-centric melting pot — similar to what America has been prior to our country’s recent turn toward xenophobia — and then Beijing, which is a sprawling megapolis at the heart of a strange cross between rampant capitalism and authoritarian socialism. In both places, I found much to be astounded about every day I was there.

YUNCHTIME: Did you know the Melon Conference organizer, Fritz Demopoulos, previously? How did you end up participating as the opening speaker of Melon Conference 2?

STEELE: I hadn’t any previous contact with Fritz until he reached out to me last year with an invitation to come to the first Melon conference (he’s resisting the impulse to call it a con, by the way, which I support; the “con” appendix has become overused and abused). As I understand, I got on his radar when he read the Wall Street Journal review of my novel Arkwright and read the book, and then Coyote after that.

But I was about to undergo a major pancreatic operation when I received the first invitation, and my doctors told me that I’d be in no shape to travel for several months afterwards, so I had to turn it down. I thought that was the end of it and that I’d kissed off a chance to visit China, but early last January Fritz surprised me by repeating the invitation, this time for Melon 2018. My doctors approved me for long-distance travel, with the usual cautions about diet, rest, and not neglecting my meds, and so I was able to attend.

When Fritz told me that I could have time for a solo presentation or an interview, I decided to go with the first, since a lot of people there might not be familiar with my work. Since I’ve been studying SF’s early history lately, I decided to make that the topic of my speech. After I told him what I meant to do, Fritz decided that this was a good topic for a keynote address, after his own keynote introduction. So it was a considerable surprise to be accorded the honor of presenting the opening session, and I tried to make the best of it. .

YUNCHTIME: So glad to know that you recovered and could go to Asia this year! How about your presentation “The History of Science Fiction, and Why it Matters” is that available online for us to read?.

STEELE: It will be reprinted as a guest editorial in an upcoming issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Sheila Williams has just bought it for the magazine. I imagine that Asimov’s will make it available on their web site when the issue comes out.

YUNCHTIME: What is your impression of Fritz Demopoulos? Is he a big SFF fan? Demopoulos is a successful entrepreneur and venture capitalist, do you think he sees a business opportunity for the SFF genre in Hong Kong and China?

STEELE: Fritz Demopoulos is an interesting fellow … a California-born ex-pat who came to Hong Kong about 20 years ago and has stayed to make his fortune. My brother-in-law did much the same thing, so I’m familiar with this sort of entrepreneurship. He’s most definitely a SF fan. He discovered the genre through finding his father’s beat-up copy of Asimov’s Foundation and has been reading SF ever since. He knows the field, is familiar with major authors both old and new, loves the same movies and TV shows the rest of us do, and overall is an example of a highly-successful businessman who also happens to be something of a geek.

Melon is Fritz’s brainchild — he’d have to explain to you why he gave it that name — and it’s unique among SF gatherings. As I said, it’s not a con in the conventional sense — yes, that’s a deliberate pun; stop groaning — but rather a symposium that’s sort of academic without being stuffy or pretentious. The people Fritz invited to be speakers were SF writers — a few Americans like myself, but mainly young Asian authors— scientists from the U.S., Europe, and Asia, and a number of Hong Kong-based entrepreneurs working in both emerging technologies like AI and also mass media

Beginning with my keynote speech, each of us got up and did 20-minute presentations or participated in on-stage interviews or panel discussions. Coffee breaks every couple of hours and a mid-day lunch gave us a chance to mingle and carry on discussions based on what had been talked about onstage.

So this wasn’t like the usual American SF convention, but neither was it like the ICFA or the Campbell conference. It’s very different from what’s being done here. and I’d give a lot to see something like it attempted in the states.

YUNCHTIME: Typically Hong Kong has been a super exciting place for business, travel, food, and cinema. How do you think SFF fits into HK culture?

STEELE: There was a lot of discussion at Melon about science fiction’s growing popularity in Hong Kong and China — there doesn’t seem to be as much interest in fantasy aside from Chinese medieval-fantasy movies and the Game of Thrones franchise — and how it’s poised to become the Next Big Thing in Chinese mass culture.

And there’s a reason for this: that part of the world has become the leader in scientific and technological development, and is rapidly outpacing the U.S. It’s much like what happened in the US and Britain when SF’s Golden Age occured during World War II and the post-war sci-tech boom. Now it’s happening over there, and I saw evidence of this just about everywhere I looked: issues of Science Fiction World being sold at just about every Chinese-language newsstand I inspected in Hong Kong and Beijing; Star Wars and Marvel superhero movies on Chinese TV every night; big SF sections in both the Chinese and English-language bookstores I visited in Beijing — I found the Mandarin edition of Coyote in what seemed to be Beijing’s largest bookstore, which made me very happy - and enormous banner-ads for Pacific Rim Uprising in bus stops and subway stations all over both cities.

So China is ready for SF, and since there are a lot of people there trying to make money from it, that’s going to be the next major market, even as genre SF slowly fades here in America.

YUNCHTIME: Were there any lively discussions or disagreements at Melon Conference 2?

STEELE: Well, again … just as Melon 2018 wasn’t a con in the way the American SF community is used to seeing, so the way things were discussed was different. In those 20-minute presentations, there wasn’t enough time for audience participation, so that sort of interaction was missing for better or worse … and having been a panel moderator more times than I can count, I’d say it was both.

On the other hand, if you wanted to discuss something with a panelist, there was a perfect opportunity to do so during the coffee breaks. Which was a difference I enjoyed very much. Instead of having to field questions shouted from the back of the room, this time I got them from someone standing right in front of me, in a calm tone of voice, while both of us having coffee and maybe a light snack.

Disagreements? Nope … just a lot of polite, stimulating conversation. Nice change from the way most American cons are these days. Cons here are becoming increasingly confrontational and unpleasant; there (in Hong Kong), it was the ideas that mattered, not the politics or gender identity of the persons expressing them.

YUNCHTIME: Are the HK Melon Conference audience familiar with US and European SFF?

STEELE: It seemed to me that they were. At least most of them seemed to be familiar with my work.

YUNCHTIME: How about the writers, are they responding to the context of our US / Euro SFF? Or primarily coming at the genre with their own perspectives?

STEELE: See, that’s one of the most interesting things I learned. The Asian SF writers and fans I met are generally quite knowledgeable about western SF — that is, English-language novels and short fiction produced by American and European authors, particularly that which has been produced over the last couple of decades.

Most are unfamiliar with a lot of the classic works and authors, because those works have been invisible to them for so long. Because my keynote speech was about the origins and cultural role of American SF, and why this history is so important to understanding the genre’s purpose, it received a good reception, if I may say so myself.

On the other hand, China’s SF writers are predominantly young, and they’re aware that they’re creating a SF culture of their own. They’re not out to mimic western SF or imitate what we’re doing, but to create their own literary world. China is justly proud of Three-Body Problem, and Cixin Liu has become something of a national literary hero, so a new generation of SF writers have been inspired by this success.

Yeah, they like American and British SF well enough, but they’re more interested in seeing what’s coming out from Bao Shu or Tang Fei than … well, just about everyone who has a story on the Nebula or Hugo ballot this year. That’s my impression, at least.

YUNCHTIME: Is there a sense of China as the emerging space race super-power, as a driver for increased interest in SFF in PRC?

To my surprise, I didn’t hear a lot about Chinese space efforts, although there were some science presentations that touched on space-related matters, such as MIT scientist Lisa Nip’s discussion of altering the human genome to produce humans adapted for living in space. That might have something to do with the fact that China’s space program is very much a government effort, and in Hong Kong there’s a certain reluctance to publicly discuss anything that might be critical of the government and the party that controls it. Another thing I learned while I was in China was the profound difference between that aspect of life in Hong Kong and life in Beijing, and if you understand Hong Kong’s historical relationship with mainland China, then you know the reasons why this is.

YUNCHTIME: Your own fiction is often in Near-future settings. With China’s rapid development of the Shenzhou spacecraft, orbiter, and aerospace missions, do you feel as though the Chinese readership will be more intrigued by near-future SF?

STEELE: I think the Chinese readers I met are interested in all kinds of SF, and thus aren’t as predisposed to drawing lines between sub-genres as western SF readers have become. It’s very refreshing to see this. And since they’re largely unfamiliar with my older work, like the Near-Space series, and more in tune with books like the Coyote series, which is set further out in time and space, I don’t think they’ve pigeon-holed me as the “blue collar guys in space” writer the way SF fans did when Orbital Decay was published almost 30 years ago. That was really refreshing, to be judged on the basis of my recent work and not the stuff I produced decades in the past.

YUNCHTIME: Are you excited about these new bridges between the Chinese language readership and English language genre fans?

STEELE: Yeah, you bet. Cixin Liu was just the first. We’re going to be seeing more writers coming out of China, provided that they can find good translators and publishers willing to take a chance on something from another side of the world.

If we can get the latter, then Ken Liu isn’t going to have to worry about getting more work as a translator. In fact, I’d say that anyone who’s cognizant of science fiction and able to translate Mandarian or Cantonese to English and vice-versa has an opportunity to get in on the coming Asian SF boom.

YUNCHTIME: Hong Kong itself is a city for time travel, connecting the colonial past with the ultra-urban future. What is your sense of HK as an sfnal space?

STEELE: The easy SF analogy for Hong Kong is cyberpunk, with Bladerunner or William Gibson’s early Sprawl novels as being the touchstones everyone uses when they’re trying to describe the city. And there’s plenty to that, particularly the way the city looks at night, when you see all these enormous, futuristic high-rises lit up above streets that are unlike any in the west, even New York. All they need are air-taxis and Rutgar Hauer chasing Harrison Ford across the rooftops.

But after I was there a couple of days, I began to get another SFnal vibe from Hong Kong, one that it took me a little while to nail down. It happened while standing in a long line with my wife and brother-in-law to take the cog-rail tram up Victoria Peak, the highest of the mountains on Hong Kong Island.

I happened to notice all the kinds of people around me, all the different languages I was overhearing — here’s some Japanese tourists, here’s a cluster of young hipsters from Germany, here’s an Australian, here’s some Koreans, here’s Linda and me, a middle-aged couple from Massachusetts — and I was suddenly reminded of the 90’s TV series, Babylon 5. And that’s Hong Kong … a crossroads between the rival superpowers dependent on both but trying to maintain its cultural, if not always political, independence all the same. If you look at Hong Kong and Hongkongers in this way, then you get a better handle on it than the more superficial Bladerunner comparison.

YUNCHTIME: After HK you went to Beijing? What was that like? How do you see China emerging as a setting, and a producer of science fiction tropes?

STEELE: Beijing was an amazing city, too, but in ways that were both similar and different from Hong Kong. I’d never been there before either, and I was just as amazed and intrigued by it as I was in Hong Kong. And it’s part of the emergence of China as the next great consumer and producer of science fiction.

Shortly before we left for China, I was invited by the Chinese cultural ministry to come back to Beijing for an international SF conference. Unfortunately, this conference is being held near the end of May, less than a couple of months after returning from nearly two weeks in China. This trip took a lot out of me, and as I said before, I’ve been seriously ill lately and I’m still recovering. So I wrote back to the conference organizers and told them that I just wasn’t in shape for another trip around the world so soon, and asked that they keep me in mind for another SF conference in Beijing if one is held in the next year or so.

As far as Beijing being a setting for SF novels … well, I toured the Forbidden City and went out to the Great Wall and went shopping in the Night Market and bade my respects to Mao’s tomb. And at some point during my travels, I found the thematic core of the book I’ve been trying to write for the last year or so. So China has influenced at least one SF novel I know about … my next one.

Thanks very much to Allen Steele for sharing his impressions of the Far East!

Allen Steele is a prolific author of Science Fiction, whose latest novel, Arkwright, is available from Tor Books.